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Hmm. I just came across an ad for a new desktop in this week's paper:

- Dual Core E3300 2.5 GHz CPU
- G31 Chipset Motherboard
- 2GB DDR2 RAM
- 250 SATAII HDD
- ATI 4350 512mb Video card
- 22x DL DVD Burner
- 2 year warranty

All for $339. Or I can upgrade to the E5400 for an extra $30; to the E7500 for $100; to the E8400 or Q8400 for $155; or to 4GB RAM for $50.

It sounds decent to me - except the hard drive's a little small (though it can be upgraded, I'm sure), and I'm not sure how powerful the E3300 is, compared to the i3 or i5. Any thoughts?

Spend the extra money on the CPU. Upgrading that later can be very difficult. Unfortunately, I don't know all the ins and outs of newer processors. I'm sure Collector will be able to tell you more.

The RAM depends on the OS. As I've said already, Win 7 needs more than Win XP.

Don't worry about the hard drive. I have a 250 GB hard drive and I've never managed to fill it up, despite the loads of videos, music, pictures and games I have on it. If it really bothers you, get a larger HD later or an external HD for storing crap you don't need right now, but don't want to delete.

DeadPoolX wrote:Spend the extra money on the CPU. Upgrading that later can be very difficult.

Absolutely correct. It is not too hard to pull a heat sink off these days, but you will still be limited to the same family of CPU, unless you also want to upgrade your mother board. At that point you might as well just get a new machine. For practical reasons, the CPU you end up with, you will have for the life of the PC. The more that you put into the CPU, the longer the usable lifespan of the PC before it becomes too old and slow to be usable. To future proof it, I would go with at least a Core2 Duo, even though they are no longer Intel's latest and greatest.

At least the chipset is Intel. The North Bridge may well be the single most important factor in how stable a PC will be, along with the often overlooked power supply. I personally have a rule of thumb. Intel chipsets for Intel CPUs and AMD chipsets for AMD CPUs.

Also, 2 GB of RAM is extremely modest these days. While XP would start to function OK with just 512 MB of RAM, 2 GB is where XP starts to be happy. 4 GB is where Vista behaves decently. Win7 is less of a resource hog than Vista, but the more RAM you throw at it the better. Of course more RAM can easily be added later, but RAM is so cheap these days.

I personally wouldn't think of anything less than a 500 GB drive. Newer OSs tend to be larger than its predecessors and Vista/Win7 are no different. They need a lot more space than XP. Remember, the Win7 disc is now on a DVD, highly compressed, not on a half empty CD like XP. Even the swap file is significantly larger. Also keep in mind that the closer that a hard drive comes to being filled, the slower it can become as well as to harder it becomes and takes longer to defrag it to the point that it is impossible to defrag it. Again, like RAM, this is hardware that has become relatively cheap. You can now easily find 1 TB hard drives for around $80.

I've done with less of a graphics card. I think that would be fine if you are not looking to play cutting edge games, but I think you might be surprised at what all you can play on it. An easy upgrade for a later time.

OK, thanks! I think I found a good buy here - at most other places here, a new computer can cost up to $600 at least.

OK, so let's see... I'll take the:

- Dual Core E3300 2.5 GHz CPU - I think I'll upgrade to either the E7500 or E8400. What is the difference between the CPUs? I'm never sure what speeds they can reach.
- G31 Chipset Motherboard - Check.
- 2GB DDR2 RAM - I'll upgrade to 4GB to be safe. I'm only planning to run XP for now, though.
- 250GB SATAII HDD - should be more than enough. 500GB would be easier - but a cheap and easy upgrade anyway.
- ATI 4350 512mb Video card - Check.
- 22x DL DVD Burner - Check.
- 2 year warranty - Check.

All that would cost $489, and I'll save nearly $100 and be quite a happy man. Just a quick question about the CPUs... what's the difference between the E7500 and E8400? Or Q8400? Sorry, but I looked up their stats and there are way too many stats. Which is the most important statistic when I try to figure out which is a better CPU? *confused*

From what I've seen, if there's a "Q" in front of the processor type, that means it's a quad-core machine. Although quad-core CPUs haven't been fully utilized in games (or many other programs), they're good to have on a long term basis. At some point -- and probably soon -- programs will take advantage of them.

Oh and if you're getting 4GB of RAM, make sure you'll have the 64-bit version of XP. The 32-bit won't recognize anything above 2GB, no matter how much RAM you install.

BTW, where are you getting this PC from? The price you quoted seems unusually cheap. Then again, I'm used to buying machines from boutique vendors, like Alienware. Even so, a PC that costs under $500 would make me wary.

The core architecture is more important than clock. The E3300 is a Celeron, which is Intel's cheap chip. Look at what you can find with a Core2. If you have to cut corners, do it with the things that can be easily upgraded. As I said, It isn't reasonable to upgrade the CPU any more than getting a slightly faster chip.

I would strongly recommend Win7. As far as XP, I don't think that you are going to save that much. I have noticed that XP drivers for new hardware aren't quite as good as what they once would have been when XP was the current Windows. Shortly you will probably find that change in APIs will make XP less than optimal for some newer programs. Let's face it, XP is nearly a decade old now and is showing its age. While with XP you will be able to qualify for an upgrade version of Windows 7, you will not be able to do an upgrade install. To go from XP to Win7 you have to do a clean install.

DeadPoolX wrote:if you're getting 4GB of RAM, make sure you'll have the 64-bit version of XP. The 32-bit won't recognize anything above 2GB, no matter how much RAM you install.

I wouldn't really recommend XP64. It really does not have wide support. You will find it hard to find drivers for it and it is missing certain APIs that weren't introduced until VISTA/7.

Collector wrote:I would strongly recommend Win7 ... Let's face it, XP is nearly a decade old now and is showing its age.

I agree. Maia and I've kept XP on our machines because we already have it and, at least as far as my PC is concerned, Win7 probably wouldn't function as well as it could. If we were getting new machines, we'd definitely go with Win7.

I have Win7 on my new laptop and I really disliked it at first, but after using it for a little while, I now prefer it over XP. There are still some functions in XP that I like over Win7, but none of them are important enough to warrant using an OS that's about a decade old if buying a new machine.

Collector wrote:

DeadPoolX wrote:if you're getting 4GB of RAM, make sure you'll have the 64-bit version of XP. The 32-bit won't recognize anything above 2GB, no matter how much RAM you install.

I wouldn't really recommend XP64. It really does not have wide support. You will find it hard to find drivers for it and it is missing certain APIs that weren't introduced until VISTA/7.

All I meant was that a 32-bit OS wouldn't be able to take advantage of anything more than 2GB of RAM. If Rath still wants to get XP, he'll need to plan accordingly. There's no point in buying RAM your OS can't use.

I realized what you meant, but I just thought I should mention it as Rath was talking about getting XP.

I think that the main thing here is to get something that the parts that can't be easily or practically upgraded later, like CPU and motherboard are the parts you should not skimp on. The rest can grow to meet your needs or extend the usable life of the machine. RAM, graphics cards and hard drives are easy upgrades. As long as the motherboard has enough expansion slots for future add-in cards you can add extra capabilities at a later point, such as HDTV tuner cards, etc. I wouldn't throw money away on XP, either.

I'd add the computer's power supply to the "don't cheap out on" list as well.

The power supply will dictate what sort of video card you can get and if you can run two side-by-side. If you're power supply isn't enough, you might find yourself somewhat limited.

Replacing the power supply is also a real hassle. It's not quite as bad as the CPU and motherboard, but it's nowhere near as simple as every other part in the machine.

DeadPoolX wrote:I'd add the computer's power supply to the "don't cheap out on" list as well.

The power supply will dictate what sort of video card you can get and if you can run two side-by-side. If you're power supply isn't enough, you might find yourself somewhat limited.

Replacing the power supply is also a real hassle. It's not quite as bad as the CPU and motherboard, but it's nowhere near as simple as every other part in the machine.

Absolutely. As I posted earlier, the two things that seem to dictate the most how stable a PC will be are the chipset (on the motherboard) and the PSU.

Hmm. The main three reasons that I'd like to run XP are:

- it's fairly easy to run legacy games (QfG, the Monkey Island series, etc.) on XP;
- I don't have to go through a lengthy process (including DRM, for crap's sake! DRM is the tool of the devil!) just to use my computer; and
- experience has taught me never to trust, or run, any Microsucks operating system before Microsloth releases Service Pack 2 for it, at least.

Am I being unnecessarily hard on Win7? I still have to use Vista at work, and I don't particularly like it.

(Not to mention what M$ did to their Office system - completely turning it upside down etc. - which is why I've decided to use OpenOffice instead). * to Microscoff*

Windows 7 could be considered "Vista SE" in the sense that it is closer to what the MS engineers intended before the marketeers got a hold of it. It is a very stable, solid OS. So far there has been no need for a service pack and the OS has been out for a year, now. I have found it to be generally more stable than XP. Some of the interface changes do take a little getting used to, but when you do you will probably find that you prefer it. I have yet to encounter anyone who didn't. There really are very few games that work in XP that don't work in 7. The two main reasons that there might be issues is with some of the DRM schemes, which is easily solved by using no CD patches and 16-bit games if you have the 64-bit version.

That said, also keep in mind that, as has already been said, XP is a decade old. It was not written for today's hardware. I have found XP drivers for modern hardware to be less than optimized and less stable than the Vista/Win7 drivers. In some cases some features are missing in the XP drivers. Newer software is starting to use APIs (Application Programming Interface) that are changed or missing in XP. This is only going to become more pronounced with time. This always happens as OSs are superseded by newer ones and XP has been by two. As good as XP was, it is time to let it go.

There's also a "Windows XP mode" built into Win7 Professional. That's one of the reasons why I chose that version when getting Win7 on my laptop.

Even without any compatibility modes, Win7 seems to work with most games and programs. In fact, I have yet to find a single program that won't run on it. I've used DOSBox on it without any more difficulties than I'd experience with XP. Plus, if you're mostly using productivity software and recent games (like Dragon Age) you won't have any problems at all.

I wouldn't bother upgrading an older machine's OS from XP to Win7, but if you're getting a brand new PC, I'd definitely recommend Win7. It wouldn't make sense to take a step backwards with a new machine.

Like Collector said, Win7 could be considered "Vista Second Edition." Think back to how awful the original Win98 was and then became so much better with Win98SE. The same premise is true here as well.

Oh and just so you know, XP has DRM built into it as well. We've been using XP for so long that we don't really think about it, but it's still there.

As for the new version of MS Office, have you tried the 2010 edition? It's fantastic. I like it a lot more than the 2007 version, although I didn't have a problem adjusting to that either. I guess I found it more difficult and time consuming to use all the drop down menus in the older versions of Office. 2010 makes it very streamlined and easy to use.

And finally, let's face it: if you're afraid of adjusting to new software, you might as well have stayed with DOS or Win95. The fact is it takes time to learn any new program, including an OS. A lot of people hated XP when it first came out, but now that we've been using it for nearly a decade, people love it (for the most part).

You have to accept that new software has a learning curve and work with current technology. If you don't, you'll find yourself not only living in the past, but unable to cope with the future.

Hmm. *shrug* Maybe I've been using Office for so long that I'm used to the older way of doing things. I've used Office 2007 and it was a little tricky at first - however, it wasn't too hard to figure out how to make it do what I need to do. I still prefer OpenOffice, though.

In what ways is DRM a part of Win7? I remember about having to telephone Microsoft, and being put on hold for 15 minutes, just to activate WinXP. Is this also the case with Win7, and is there anything else that needs DRM? Or... can I just turn it off somehow?

Honestly, I don't know what type of DRM is in Win7. Collector probably would having used the OS longer than I have.

As for Office... if it comes with the PC, I'd get it. Office 2010 is really nice. However, if you'd have to spend a lot money on it, you'd probably be best off keeping to OpenOffice.